Then turn them off. All these things landed because users _do_ use them. I 100% want web share, page visibility, usb, and native file system, for instance, because the browser has become a convenient replacement for a bunch of playgroup/PoC/testbed applications that I might have used 10 years ago.
Just like users "used" the toolbar API back in the Internet Explorer 6 days? Used as in they got the toolbar foisted on them while installing some crapware.
The notifications API is the same. How many of those "uses" are legitimate uses that users consciously want, and how many of them are misclicks or just clicking yes to dismiss the prompt so they can access the content they wanted in the first place?
In my case there's only one website I can think of where I want notifications from my browser: Slack. I can understand that some people might want them for e-mails, social networks, etc but even then that's only like a dozen or so websites. In contrast there more websites than that which use notifications for spammy/annoying/unnecessary purposes, and sadly some people do fall for them and then get their time wasted by these notifications.
In a perfect world where nobody would try to take advantage of people I would totally want web notifications to be a thing because there's basically no downside (websites won't try to use them for spam) and potential upsides.
In a world where it's not only legal but morally acceptable to take advantage of people, waste their time, stalk them, etc (there's a whole industry around this called "martech") I would happily sacrifice the few legitimate uses of web notifications if it means non-technical users can't accidentally opt-into crap and then have their time wasted by spam because they don't know how to opt-out.
First of all, that's backwards. These features had to land before anyone could use them. Users can't use them before they land, so they couldn't have landed because they were being used.
Second, how can you know if these features are widely used or not? There's been lots of technologies that have been added to web browsers over the years that weren't widely used, and were later removed.
There are people who want to be spied by social networks to have a pair of free shoes and post pictures of them online
It doesn't mean it's the right thing to do for society
Browsers have gone far beyond their purpose in an inorganic way
It's like if my alarm suddenly started making coffee, toasts, working as remote and the new planned feature was the ability to warm itself up and iron my shirts
And it would still be a fraction of what browsers do today
To clarify, most of these work by asking for permission first, and you can set them to "always deny" in the browser settings: chrome://settings/content
There are similar site content settings in any major browser.
There are a ton of features that browsers have added, and then tossed because no one used them. As well as features the browser vendors wish they could get rid of, but can't because too many sites made use of them.
